"The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"

John 1:29

Today’s passage includes two titles of Jesus: ‘Lamb of God’ (v. 29) and ‘God’s Chosen One’ (v. 34). ‘Chosen’ usually signifies privilege. As ‘God’s Chosen One,’ Jesus fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy: ‘Here is my servant … my chosen one in whom I delight.’1 Being chosen entails more than prestige, position, or power. Those chosen by God are also chosen for God’s purposes. Isaiah’s prophecy continues, ‘he will bring justice to the nations’; this justice, however, was not accomplished by a warrior king striding forth in might and majesty—‘He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets’2—but by the blood, sweat, and tears of the man John the Baptist introduced as ‘the Lamb of God.’

John the Baptist cried, ‘Look, the Lamb of God’ (v. 29). Several decades later, the apostle John was given a vision from God in which he was invited to see that ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed’; yet when John looked, he saw no majestic lion, only ‘a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain’ yet triumphant ‘at the center of the throne.’3 God’s Chosen One bore the intolerable burden of ‘the sin of the world’ (v. 29) to make available to us, his chosen ones, the immeasurable blessings of salvation. Jesus is both Lamb and Lion, meekness and majesty, Servant and Savior.

As God’s chosen people, we are richly blessed in Christ, who ‘takes us to the high places of blessing in him’4 but, like our Master, we are also chosen to suffer—allowing his refining fire to perfect us in holiness and his potter’s wheel to mold us into Christlikeness—and called to step out of our comfort zones and make sacrifices for God’s kingdom.